In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Tom Van Baak writes: >The danger, though, is that in the 60s maybe ten systems >were affected by leap seconds. In the 80s maybe a >thousand. Today, the number of systems affected (or is >it infected?) with leap second awareness is in the millions. > >I worry about this trend in the decades to come. I am >a fan of leap seconds as a weird and curious nuisance >but am not sure I like the idea that eventually my car, >traffic lights, airlines, television, and my thermostat will >have to be reliably tied to the IERS in order to function >properly. > >Don't forget the quartz wristwatch is only 40 years old. >What if cesium wristwatches show up 10 years from >now. What if some killer app 40 years hence requires >100 ms or 1 ms time accuracy. Do we still want UTC >leap seconds when it will infect ten billion devices?
You mean like mobile phones and optical tele networks ? We have those today. >This is not an argument for change right now. But no >matter how you look at it the current scheme does not >scale well into the future; either a technological future >(way too many devices affected by unscheduled time >steps) or an astronomical future (way too many leap >seconds a year). Amen. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.